An ECG-Based Signal Key Establishment Protocol in Body Area Networks

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) provide continuous body health monitoring and analysis of physiological parameters. A high degree of security and privacy protection for BSN is extremely required. In this paper, a highly flexible authentication and key establishment protocol based on ECG signals and fuzzy commitment, namely ESKE, is proposed. The uniqueness of ECG signals guarantees that ESKE can provide long, random, low latency, distinctive and temporal variant keys. The fuzzy commitment assures ESKE scheme can tolerate the high degree of noise and variability inherently in ECG signals. A priori distribution of keying material is not required in ESKE. Experiment results shows that ESKE can not only guarantee data confidentiality, authenticity and Integrity, but also resist malicious attacks efficiently.